Snark Done Properly

Imagine Ed Henry. Now imagine him at Jack In The Box. Repeat as necessary.

Thank Heaven For Bullshit....

.....without it what would little boys do?

"Cities Deal With Surge In Shantytowns" shrieks the NY Times headline.

Guess they don't get out that much on the Upper West Side these days, or wherever Times reporters live until they lose their jobs. Tulsa, of course, has had a, um, thriving "Tent City" for about 15 years now, and we ain't even ground zero. That's some timely journalism there, boys.

Hey! Just wondering....what's that Macarena thing all about?

My Etonian Problem....And Ours

A little sanctimonious gibberish from Andrew Sullivan.

Publishing 3.1 - Death By Twitter

Blood and horror at SXSW.

AIG Simplified

h/t xkcd

Update: Michel Lewis addresses this very issue.

Goure on Israel

Daniel Goure of the Lexington Institute has quite an amusing post which speaks body bags about the blinkered world-view and unfounded assumptions which define the thinking of the Israeli Lobby and their fellow travelers. Actually, Goure appears to doubt the existence of an Israeli Lobby in something of the same way that J. Edgar Hoover once claimed to doubt the existence of the Mafia.

At any rate, here is Goude describing his beatific vision of a glorious future in which Israel and the U.S. walk hand in hand through a common adventure in reshaping the Middle East:

The reality is that no so-called Israel lobby is necessary to impact U.S. Middle East policy because our interests and those of Israel are largely congruent. Whether it is the natural affinity of democracies; our shared political and social modernity; the common opposition to Soviet expansionism during the Cold War; the sharing of intelligence; technology cooperation; equal distance, politically speaking, from the internecine political warfare that consumes the Arab world; a mutual determination to defeat terrorism; or a shared culture…Israel and America are in accord. What is the basis for our strategic relationship with the Arab nations? The answer is one word, oil. Absent oil, Israel alone would continue to hold our interest in the region. If the Obama Administration is successful in weaning the U.S. from its addiction to oil, Israel alone will be of strategic interest to this country. At least that will be the case until democracy and representative governance takes hold elsewhere in the region.

Of course, many of us would vastly prefer that "absent oil" the United States have no strategic interests of any kind in the Middle East....perhaps we could station a cultural attache there, but beyond that, nothing at all. Absent oil, we would have little need for a forward military base and none at all for any entangling alliances. Let the Saudi Royal Family and the Knesset paddle their own canoes. Unfortunately the oil reserves will not run dry all at once and, as they get scarcer and more expensive, it is more likely than not that all the great powers will deal themselves a hand in a bloody contest that will make The Great Game look like a round of pinochle. Imagine a world without struggles for control of the Crimea, without Suez Crises, without future 9/11s. It seems to me to be a pretty picture for Americans. For Israel it may look a bit different.

I feel very little concern little concern for what I feel is Israel's increasingly tenuous relationship with representative democracy. Further, in light of Israel's irksome tendency to spy on the United States, to mention the "sharing of intelligence" seems a trifle ironic. I do not perceive that America is at war with the tactic of terrorism, no matter how deplorable it is - this kind of sentimental claptrap is a residue of the bankrupt Wilsonism of the Bush administration. As to representative government taking hold in the region, let's wait for it to take a good,firm hold in Israel first, shall we?

More Gibberish From Arlen Specter....This Time On AIG Contracts

Once upon a time, when we all lived in the forest, a man we will call Arlen Specter worked as a DA.

Since that time he has traded in this morsel of history, much as Jake Spoon in Lonesome Dove , to establish a wholly undeserved reputation as a legal thinker worthy of some deference. For those who don't recall the inglorious facts, this tendency reached it's apogee when, during the Clinton impeachment trial, Specter voted "Not Proven" as opposed to "not guilty" or "guilty"....an archaic verdict form (sometimes known as; "not guilty, and don't do it again") once prevalent in Scottish law and, to the best of my knowledge, nowhere else. If nothing else, this alone should cement Specter's already well-deserved reputation as tiresome pedant and coward.

Now, normally, I don't trash Specter - I leave that to the long-suffering Republicans. However, this afternoon, I find that he is all over the TV asserting that the AIG retention bonus contracts are not unenforceable . This is not true. This is a lie. Specter knows that it is a lie. Arlen Specter is a liar.

In support of his ludicrous position Specter claims that the contracts are void "as a matter of public policy" and cites to the Restatement Of Contracts to buttress this argument. More specifically, Specter avers that the contracts are void ab initio in the same way a contact for the sale of heroin, for the sale of a human slave, or for the personal service of prostitution would be. Of course, those contracts are void because the subject matter of the hypotyhetical contracts are in and of themselves criminal. Citing "Public Policy" and appealing to the Restatement Of Contracts is lawyerspeak for "I have no statutory or case law in support of my position".

And, in fact, the stimulus and TARP legislation in question specifically allow for these bonus payouts, provided that they accrue to the recipients for services rendered predating the passage of the legislation.

Personally, I am, for the first and hopefully last time in my life, wholly in agreement with Sen. Grassley's recommendation that the AIG crew commit ritual seppuku. But the only thing worse than letting AIG get the money is having our legislature ignore the laws that they themselves are responsible for.